Songfacts®:

• Speaking with Classic Pop Magazine, OMD vocalist Andy McCluskey explained the background to this tune: "We looked at how we had constructed some of our more unusual songs, and a lot of them were made from concrete music, found sounds, and we looked at what we had explored in the past and we were trying not to repeat ourselves, and, well, we've done trains; we've done machinery," he explained. "And then I actually said to myself "I realise now that everything that we've sampled from the real world - trains, machines, computers, guns, typewriters - they were actually accidental". The audio that we had sampled was a waste product from the specific design function of whatever it was that we had recorded.
  
  "Let me clarify that," he continued. "A typewriter is designed to type things onto a page, not make a clicking noise when you hit the key. A steam engine is not designed to go 'chuff chuff'. That's an audio waste product of the inefficiency of its engine. And as the world has modernised, the accidental audio by-products, waste products, of the things that have become concrete music are going to be less and less because the designers have designed out the waste so that the machinery of the modern world has actually become more silent. So 'The Future Will Be Silent' is actually a reference to that concept."